On
New Year’s Day of 1974, Vidyadhara Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche began teaching
the first of two seminars on Zen and tantra. He was in the early phase of
a North American career that would last 17 years, and would be a potent
force in the spiritual constellation of the continent. Beginning very
modestly, Trungpa Rinpoche would eventually give hundreds of public and
private seminars, comprising thousands of individual teaching talks. The
record of his published work—still far from complete—includes scores of
books, among them volumes of poetry and calligraphy. (1) Despite his
inveterate curiosity, his wide-ranging, multicultural education, and a
seemingly boundless range of endeavor (2), Trungpa Rinpoche focused the
bulk of his enormous energy on his students. In his first three years in
North America (1970-73) he taught fundamental topics of the Buddhist path
and view of mind, always with a strong emphasis on the practice of
meditation, and on the example of the vajra masters in his lineage. His
uncompromising, yet charming style attracted many students in these first
years, and of these no small portion were from Zen sanghas. The talks in
this volume appear, from a 30-year remove, to signal a turning point for
the community. Acknowledging the strength and discipline gained from Zen
influence, Trungpa Rinpoche distinguishes the two traditions, and points
out the path on which he intends to take his students.

If
in these first years, Trungpa Rinpoche emphasized the Tibetan vajrayana,
he could scarcely have done otherwise: he’d been thoroughly trained in the
system since before his second birthday, [3] and was by nature as well as by training, a
crazy-wisdom, tantric adept. He literally embodied the vajrayana. In
America, he’d given many talks describing tantra. More significantly and
more famously, he had in his talks and demeanor created an atmosphere that
itself seemed tantric: an atmosphere at once electric and ordinary,
mysterious and simple, clarifying and confusing, boring and magnetic.

By
the time he gave the seminars in this book, Trungpa Rinpoche had only
begun to present the full structure of the nine-yana path. During the
three months prior to these talks, he had convened and taught the
Vajradhatu Seminary—the first of thirteen such three-month programs—in
which he detailed the Buddhist path from beginning to end. His manner of
presentation was modern and sometimes shocking, but the path he described,
and the texts upon which he based his exposition, were classical. Also
classical, and also shocking to the new seminarians, was his introduction
of a higher level of discipline and academic study. He worked in a
systematic way, portraying the nine yanas almost as a surveyor or
cartographer would, and he expected people to keep up. As for fully
entering his students into the vajrayana with transmission and
empowerment, he was on the verge of it, but had not yet done it.

Trungpa Rinpoche
had, on the other hand, made profound commitments to these students, and
he was about to accept them formally as tantric disciples. The tradition
at this point is to warn people away from such irreversible commitment, to
put up obstacles, and at the very least, to make sure they know what they
are getting into. Later in the summer of 1974, he taught explicitly,
extensively, and publicly on tantra, in a series of fifteen talks at the
first convocation of the Naropa Institute in Boulder. (3) But in the
wintry days at the beginning of the year, Trungpa Rinpoche seemed
interested first in making distinctions, pointing out to his students (and
other assorted listeners) how a tantric path might differ from the style
and feeling and emphasis that had grown up in his community so far—a style
that he cheerfully admitted owed much to Zen. “I think we are closer to
Zen. We may be practicing Zen in the spirit of tantra,” is how he put it,
chuckling, when questioned in the second of these lectures.

This act of
distinction, subtle but definite, was carried out with utmost respect for
both traditions. That he should feel respect and devotion to his own
crazy-wisdom lineage and tradition is normal. That Trungpa Rinpoche should
display affectionate, penetrating insight with regard to Zen is
remarkable, attributable possibly to a number of close friendships he’d
forged with Zen masters in North America. Through these friendships, one
can feel his respect for the Zen tradition altogether, and how it led to
his using certain Zen forms for his public meditation halls and rituals.
Possibly one can feel as well why so many Zen students were drawn to
Trungpa Rinpoche. For whichever reason they came, these practitioners had
a definite effect on the emerging character of his “scene,” and he
developed in return a humorous, teasing—sometimes mocking—approach in
dealing with these people. He was not above puncturing a student’s
arrogance by calling something they’d said or done as “very Zen,” or of
lamenting—as he does in these talks—the trips American students tended to
make from the most functional aspects of Zen form, turning basic routines
into aesthetic contests. In 1978, Trungpa Rinpoche criticized Zen students
to the great amusement of his audience, remarking that “although they
might have excellent posture in the Zendo, the minute they take off their
robes and go off in their apartments, they develop their own little
neuroses. They …carry on hanky-panky of all kinds in their
apartments—un-Zen hanky-panky!”

His first and most
significant encounter
[2] was with Suzuki
Roshi, founding abbot of the San Francisco Zen
Center. Suzuki Roshi, his wife Suzuki Sensei (mostly known simply as
“Okusan”), and Trungpa Rinpoche and his wife Diana Mukpo, were all
introduced in May of 1970 by Rinpoche’s publisher, Sam Bercholz. During a
visit to Zen Center,
an immediate affinity—what everyone who saw it called a “heart
connection”—sprang up between the two teachers. Trungpa Rinpoche later
confided to his wife that Suzuki Roshi was the first person he’d met in
America who reminded him of his
root guru in Tibet, Jamgön Kongtrül. He went on to say that in Roshi he’d
found his first spiritual friend in the West.

By 1970, Suzuki
Roshi had been living and teaching in North America for a dozen years,
working intensively with the American students who’d joined his sitting
practice, and the community that had grown up around him. With the
purchase in the late 1960s of Tassajara, a monastery deep in the mountains
of LosPadres National Forest
and the publication of Suzuki’s first book, Zen Mind Beginner’s Mind in
1970, the ZenCenter had begun to grow rapidly. Suzuki
Roshi often discussed the challenge of presenting traditional Zen Buddhist
dharma in a cultural vacuum, to American students who fit no category that
he, a Japanese teacher, was familiar with. He struggled with this, and his
struggle gave rise to innovative, powerful teachings and a vigorous
community.

According to
biographer David Chadwick, Suzuki Roshi was familiar with Trungpa
Rinpoche’s work, as Roshi had read Meditation in Action, and had heard
praise from his own students who’d met the young Tibetan. On this first
visit, Trungpa Rinpoche was quite interested in how Suzuki Roshi taught
the technique of counting breaths during sitting meditation, and the
Tibetan also took careful note of forms and atmosphere at Zen Center.
During his first years in America, Rinpoche had stressed sitting
meditation for his students—distinct from other practices or pujas in the
Tibetan traditions—but had not given a standardized technique. When he
finally chose a uniform style of practice for his students, Rinpoche too
placed emphasis on breath as the primary object of meditation, but
differently from Zen. The instructions for posture also were slightly
different—more relaxed—and the method of working with thoughts also varied
from the Zen style. The practice was different, but as he said “not so
different.” He adopted Zen sitting cushions known as zafus, but had them
sewn in red and yellow instead of Zen black; he incorporated the Zen
practice of alternating sitting and walking periods throughout a practice
block, but instituted a variable, as opposed to predictable, schedule. As
he did with many forms he encountered in the West, Trungpa Rinpoche
blended aspects that seemed to be working for American students with the
traditional Tibetan ways he’d inherited; he created forms that were fresh
and that fit.

In their subsequent
meetings and in letters, Suzuki Roshi and Trungpa Rinpoche shared ideas
for furthering buddhadharma in America, among them exchanging students and
teachings, founding a Buddhist university, and creating a dharmically-oriented
therapeutic community. Trungpa Rinpoche did send several of his senior
students for training to Tassajara, and with Suzuki Roshi’s blessing, used
experienced Zen Center practitioners to lead extended sittings —day-long (nyinthün)
and month-long (dathün) retreats—in his burgeoning scene in Vermont and
later the Rocky Mountains.

An example of
Trungpa Rinpoche’s regard for Suzuki Roshi is that during the first dathün
in North America, he allowed the rule of silence to be lifted only once
each day—for a reading from Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind. But the most
striking expression of veneration is that from their first meeting, until
his death in 1987, Trungpa Rinpoche had placed on every shrine wall, in
every center associated with his work, a picture of Suzuki Roshi. The
other few photos
[3] on these walls were Rinpoche’s personal teachers and
ancestors; that Suzuki Roshi’s Japanese face looked out from among Tibetan
lineage holders was powerful poetry. It was also fitting, for Suzuki Roshi
referred to Trungpa Rinpoche as being “like my son.”

It is relatively
difficult to manipulate shamatha-vipashyana for personal aggrandizement,
or to make a trip out of shikantaza, as Roshi called the purest
form of Zen sitting. But both teachers ended up working patiently (if
occasionally wrathfully) to keep their students on a goalless path. The
America they found themselves in resembled a spiritual jungle: it was
fertile, opulent, and rich; it was also overgrown, chaotic, and full of
danger for the seeker. Suzuki Roshi and Trungpa Rinpoche shared between
them the disappointments and loneliness they felt in walking through that
jungle, and in leading others through it.

The next important
Zen connection Trungpa Rinpoche made was with the soft-spoken, powerful
master Kobun Chino Otogawa. When Rinpoche had asked Suzuki Roshi about
calligraphy, Roshi directed him to Kobun, as the young teacher liked to be
called, living at that time about an hour’s drive south of San Francisco.
Their actual meeting turned out to be almost accidental. Trungpa Rinpoche
had come to Los Altos to consult with a group of psychologists. Abe Maslow,
Anthony Sutich, and others, including Sonja Margulies, editor the
influential Journal of Transpersonal Psychology, wanted to meet Trungpa
Rinpoche because of his startling presentation of psychology as integrated
into spiritual life. Margulies happened to be studying zen under Kobun,
and when Rinpoche arrived, she made a point of introducing the two.

“They hit it off
immediately,” Margulies recalls. “They were both young men—Asians out of
their cultures—both had married young Western girls—Kobun, a red-head,
Trungpa, a blond—and both had young children. They had a lot in common.”
Beyond that, both men had admiring connections to Suzuki Roshi, were
poets, would prove themselves master calligraphers, and both had an
intuitive ability to speak the dharma to Western students, though in very
different styles. On this early visit they did calligraphy together. Kobun
had a variety of fine Japanese brushes, including a very large one.
Rinpoche had never worked with a brush of such scale—indeed Tibetan
syllables are usually written with a stylus—but he delighted in working
with this one. Through the years, Trungpa Rinpoche developed a unique
style of writing, blending brush calligraphy with the various scripts of
formal Tibetan calligraphy.

Kobun, having
trained at Eiheiji Monastery in ceremony and ritual, helped with these
aspects of practice at Zen Center
when he first came to America.
Starting in the middle 1970s, as Trungpa Rinpoche gradually introduced
more discipline and form to his community, Kobun performed this same role
for Vajradhatu. He taught students the traditional approach to chanting,
drumming, ritual procession, and most invasively for the students,
Zen-monastery-style eating, with oryoki bowls. Kobun introduced oryoki
practice with care and a certain trepidation, for it is an intimate, inner
practice of the Zen tradition. Trungpa Rinpoche prized oryoki practice
highly, and though it met resistance among his students, he repeatedly did
his best to encourage the practice.

Another important
stream of teachings flowed into Shambhala-Vajradhatu through connection to
Kobun: the practice of the way of the bow, kyudo. In the mid-1970s Kobun
introduced Trungpa Rinpoche to his own kyudo master and family friend,
Kanjuro Shibata Sensei, twentieth in a familial succession of bowmakers to
the throne of Japan. Trungpa Rinpoche invited Shibata Sensei to teach his
martial art to the Shambhala sangha, and to take up residence in Colorado.
Over time, Shibata Sensei acceded to both requests, moving with his wife
to Boulder
and propagating a form of kyudo that he felt cleaved to its spiritual
roots. Sensei scorned what he termed “sports kyudo”—purely trying to hit
the target and win competitions. In Shambhala, Shibata Sensei was able to
pass on the profound heart of his tradition. Mrs Shibata, herself a master
of several Japanese do (ways) introduced students to the profundity of
kado (the way of flowers) and chanoyu (tea ceremony).

When Trungpa
Rinpoche created Naropa Institute in 1974, fulfilling another part of the
vision he’d shared with Suzuki Roshi, he asked Kobun to help with the
place, and to look after it in the future. Kobun visited Naropa every year
until his tragic death in the summer of 2001, guiding the school with his
own elegant, understated presence and his serious practice. At the time of
his death, Kobun held the Wisdom Chair at Naropa, and numerous of his
artworks graced the campus.

The friendship
between Kobun and Trungpa Rinpoche remained through the years as it had
begun—gentle, loving, creative. “It was like family,” observed publisher
Sam Bercholz. “There was absolutely no one-upmanship; they connected in a
way that was simply like sharing food and drink. Kobun was always just
there.” Indeed, early in their friendship, Kobun and Rinpoche pledged to
be reborn as brothers throughout their lives.

In 1971, Eido
Shimano Roshi hosted a visit from Trungpa Rinpoche. Eido Roshi—known then
as Tai-san—was a student of the great Soen Roshi, who’d sent him to the
West. Tai-san had been eager to come, and had learned a very good English;
he’d first visited New York in 1963, serving as translator to Yasutani
Roshi. Eido Roshi was by 1971 a dynamic, macho-tending Zen teacher of the
old style: he favored things Japanese and strict. He could on the other
hand create an electrifying atmosphere through dramatic use of Zen forms,
as well as his intense personal presence. He was also a talented artist.

Eido Roshi and
Trungpa Rinpoche met together a number of times in Eido’s home in New
York, at least once together with Soen Roshi himself. On this occasion,
Eido Roshi warned Trungpa Rinpoche—famous for making his students wait
hours for a talk—that if he were to come to meet Soen, he would have to be
on time. Rinpoche arrived a very correct ten minutes early. The masters
all did calligraphy together and were served sake by a devoted student
who’d bizarrely kept the bottle against her body for three days. She’d
been told that sake tasted best at “human body temperature.”

Eido Roshi was in
equal measure suspicious of and fascinated by Trungpa Rinpoche. “Who is
this guy?” he asked a student who knew them both. What Roshi seemed to
want to know was how Trungpa Rinpoche could be an acknowledged lineage
master, and scholar with a devoted following, and at the same time have
habits like smoking cigarettes, drinking alcohol, and conducting
extramarital affairs with his students. Every time Eido Roshi had ventured
into these behaviors—and it seems he ventured fairly often—he suffered
unpleasant consequences. The student explained that Rinpoche hid neither
his drinking nor his philandering, that deceit and shame played no role in
his approach, and that he genuinely seemed to love all his students, not
only the female ones with whom the intimacy developed to a point of
physical love.

Eido Roshi came to
Karmê Chöling after Rinpoche’s death in 1987, where Trungpa Rinpoche was
to be cremated. Unable to stay for the ceremony because of prior
commitments, Roshi meditated with Rinpoche’s body, met with his wife and
eldest son (the present Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche) and performed private
rituals. He also left as a gift a box of priceless incense that was
subsequently used at the cremation. Roshi felt so touched at Karmê Chöling
that he stayed until the last minute before his flight, soaking up the
atmosphere of devotion, and of the mindful, cheerful, indefatigable
preparation that had been going on for many weeks. As his car finally
raced at illegal speeds toward the airport, he proclaimed to his attendant
over and again that he’d at last seen the greatness of Trungpa Rinpoche;
he’d seen Rinpoche’s greatness in the environment of Karmê Chöling and in
the comportment of his students. Roshi announced to his stressed driver
that Trungpa Rinpoche was in fact kami. This nomination from Shinto
tradition would have pleased Trungpa Rinpoche very much, as it refers to a
larger-than-human energy usually associated with environments—rivers,
valleys, mountains, springs, and so on; such energy could also be found
associated with noble clans, nation-states, and genuine spiritual
practice, and is many ways equivalent to the Tibetan term drala. Invoking
and manifesting drala had filled the last ten years of Trungpa Rinpoche’s
life and teaching.

It was at the 1976
ceremony installing Eido Roshi as abbot of Dai Bosatsu Monastery in
upstate New York that Trungpa Rinpoche met Maezumi Roshi. This complex and
important friendship post-dates the talks in this book and is thus beyond
its scope, but perhaps one story might be included, to show how Trungpa
Rinpoche had begun to assume a “care-taking,” advisory role toward the Zen
teachers around him.

Dennis Genpo Merzel
(now Roshi,) acted as Maezumi Roshi’s attendant at the Dai Bosatsu
ceremony, and in this capacity, he scurried around between events,
inviting people to come to Maezumi Roshi’s rooms for tea and refreshments.
Trungpa Rinpoche accepted the invitation, and sat next to Genpo during the
palaver. At one point Rinpoche leaned over and quietly asked, “Are you
Roshi’s attendant?”

Until this time,
Genpo had only thought of himself as Maezumi Roshi’s student, so he
replied, “Sort of.” “Then you should never leave his side!” Rinpoche told
him sharply. Genpo felt this direct address as a wake-up call—for himself
personally, and for the entire Zen Center of Los Angeles community—on how
to attend their teacher.

The fatherly
approach Trungpa Rinpoche took toward young Zen teachers went quite a bit
further in the case of Jakusho Bill Kwong Roshi. Bill Kwong had been a
close and important disciple of Suzuki Roshi’s, and had, with the help of
ZenCenter and Richard Baker, gotten an
excellent piece of land in the Sonoma Valley
on which to establish a Zen practice place after Suzuki Roshi’s death.
Trungpa Rinpoche visited him often at what came to be called Sonoma Mountain
ZenCenter; he made sure as well that Kwong
was invited to any of his appearances in the San Francisco Bay
area, and given a good seat in the front row.

But there were
demands as well. Kwong was asked to come help with the first dathün in
Colorado, and Trungpa Rinpoche heightened the communication between them,
not allowing empty forms to suffice. When Kwong replied once in an
automatic way to Rinpoche’s inquiry, saying he was “fine,” Trungpa
Rinpoche fixed him with a stare, and a vigorous “What!?” that left the
young Kwong feeling he’d been “crushed to pieces,” with the fragments
falling into Trungpa Rinpoche’s palm. On another occasion, Trungpa
Rinpoche sat rolling a vajra in his hand—a symbolic
thunderbolt/weapon/scepter used in tantric practice—and Kwong asked
somewhat idly what it was. Trungpa Rinpoche simply handed it to him, as a
gift.

That golden vajra
sits today on the main altar at
Sonoma Mountain, and in the middle
of an open grassy hill a few hundred yards away, a portion of Trungpa
Rinpoche’s bones lie in a beautiful, copper-and cedar Japanese-style
reliquary hut. Another hundred yards further on, down a winding path to a
shady grove of oak and laurel, some of Suzuki Roshi’s ashes are buried
beneath the kind of stupa he preferred—a large, shapely granite boulder.
Thus the two teachers are in a kind of characteristic posthumous
proximity. Both Kwong Roshi and Kobun observed that while zen is full of
shadow, indirect allusion, hiddeness, mystery and moonlight, the vajrayana
taught by Trungpa Rinpoche radiated with sunlight and brilliant color and
clarity and openness.

In the talks in this
book, Trungpa Rinpoche uses exactly this kind of aesthetic contrast to
tease out the differences in the two paths. Where Zen aesthetic, based in
the yogacharin tradition of “mind-only,” leads to statements of refined
simplicity and elegance, tantra needs no statement at all, opting for the
naked bluntness of things as they are. Where Zen leads to a clear, open,
lofty mind, tantra points to ordinary mind, the lowest of the low. Trungpa
Rinpoche pictured such differences for his hirsute audiences as being
comparable to a beautifully dressed noble person (Zen), as opposed to an
unemployed, unshaven samurai (tantra), or like the teacup and skullcup of
this book’s title. That tantric aesthetic was rougher stemmed not from its
lack of sophistication or practice, but rather from the notion that
refinement or self-conscious artistic statement were no longer necessary
for the tantric yogi.

These varied
approaches to art and aesthetic expression, Trungpa Rinpoche says, derive
from the philosophical roots underpinning the two traditions. Scholars and
surveyors of Buddhism have long been fond of placing zen in categories,
associating it with this or that textual tradition. (The great Edward
Conze’s “mahayana Buddhism plus Chinese jokes” is not atypical.) When
Trungpa Rinpoche places Zen at the highest development of the mahayana, he
does so not based on sutra allusion or historical accident alone. He
recognizes Zen as an insider, with the sure feeling of one whose entire
life had been devoted to learning and (more so) to practicing the paths of
Buddhism; he recognizes Zen as one who himself had grown up in a
monastery, and knew intimately how the training felt and worked on a
student; he recognizes Zen as one who had studied devotedly at the feet of
his teachers, and knew the crucial function of “warm hand to warm hand”
lineage transmission in Zen.

In these seminars
Trungpa Rinpoche praises Zen as an “extraordinary development of
precision;” he calls it fantastic, he points out how with its sharp
black-and-white distinctions, and exhausting monastic schedule, Zen leads
to a full realization of prajna (wisdom). Then he goes on to say that
tantra was a further step. And yet there is no sense of hierarchy
imposed—or at least no clear one. While Zen stands as the fruition of
mahayana, Trungpa Rinpoche posits, crazy wisdom reaches the fruition of
vajrayana, the third great aspect of the Buddhist path.

It is startling that
Trungpa Rinpoche could posit tantra as an evolution of Zen, a step beyond
it, while conveying absolutely no sense of belittlement. But that is
exactly what he manages in the seminars, through sympathetic insight and
admiration. The matter of their relative status for him is not clear-cut
in any case. In other talks on Zen, Rinpoche acknowledged that it would
definitely be possible for Zen practitioners to attain tantric
realization, and he mentions Suzuki Roshi as an example of someone who had
done it. He further allowed, in the commentary on the Zen “ox-herding”
pictures included in this volume, that the latter illustrations portray
tantric understanding. He wrote, “…the final realization of Zen leads to
the wisdom of maha ati” (the highest level of tantra). According to
Rinpoche’s commentary, this is portrayed in the seventh drawing of the
sequence. The eighth, ninth, and tenth pictures —all further steps on the
Zen path—show different aspects of tantric enlightenment. Thus on the one
hand Zen leads to tantra, but on the other hand, the Zen path, seen
through its art, accurately describes tantric fruition—how could this be?
Perhaps Zen and tantra are not what one thinks.

Notes

[1]
He was a vigorous artist as well, mounting several full-scale
environmental installations, writing pieces for theatre and film, and— –
despite working mindfully and utterly without hurry—, producing an
astonishing number of original calligraphs, drawings, photographs, and
lithographs.

[2] As a teacher and
meditation master, he met with and counseled professionals from the fields
of psychology, medicine, business, and education, founding in this latter
branch a collegial institute for learning in 1974 that developed into the
fully accredited Naropa University.

[3] Later edited and
published as Journey Without Goal, Prajna Publications, 1981.